Killer Bees Invade Europe: Emerging Glass Artists Invited to Speak at Pergamon Museum in Berlin
September 1, 2010
By Kai Scholefield
A Calgary-based glass art collective comprised of artists Phillip Bandura, Tim Belliveau and Ryan Fairweather have plenty to celebrate as they prepare to travel to Europe for the second consecutive year. The Bee Kingdom art collective, as they are known, has been invited to speak at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin after working with artist Felekshan Onar during a residency at the Glass Furnace in Turkey last year.
Collaboration is a fundamental element in the design and creation of the Bee Kingdom’s work (hence the reference to a hive in their name), and much of their content is drawn from natural phenomenon. And during their residency in Turkey the Bee Kingdom combined their dynamic with Felekshan to create a glass sculpture adapted from their Beacon series. The resulting collaborative piece was selected to show in an exhibition of modern Islamic art at the Pergamon museum in October later this year.
During the show at the museum, select artists have been invited to speak about their work and the Bee Kingdom are among those chosen few. Their particular talk will touch on their experiences working in Turkey with Felekshan and how it has informed their art making practice. The Bee Kingdom will also have the opportunity during this talk to present the concepts behind their own solo exhibition Soft Power which runs in conjunction to the Pergamon exhibition.
Presented by the New Glass and Photography Gallery in Berlin, Soft Power was originally coined as a political term by Joseph Nye in 1990 for the degree of influence a nation possesses based on its cultural identity. The individual works by each artist orbit this theme of cultural attraction but also maintain clear elements of each artist’s own motif of cute culture, political satire, and mythologies and boundaries between the wilderness and industrialization.
The Bee Kingdom’s solo exhibition opens in September, with their talk at the Pergamon occurring in October. Both are made possible by support from the Canada Council and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. More information on the Bee Kingdom can be found at www.beekingdom.ca
